Friday, June 19, 2009

Karl's Weekend Reading

WalpinGate is what they are calling it. You wouldn't know this, as the MSM is covering it all up. The firing of federal Inspector General Gerald Walpin. The WSJ offers the best summary on the topic: The White House Fires a Watchdog.In adition to the obligatory quote, we'll post the names of some losers mentioned in the article. Nothing like having your name in lights!

...Mr. Walpin wrote a 29-page report, signed by two other senior members of his office, and submitted it in April to Congress. Last Wednesday, he got a phone call from a White House lawyer telling him to resign within an hour or be fired.
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President Obama.
NBA star Kevin Johnson.
Career prosecutor with US Attorney's office, Lawrence Brown.
Obama fundraiser, Alan Solomont.
Special counsel for the President, Norman Eisen.
White House Council, Gregory Craig.
First Lady, Michelle Obama.
Americorp's senior advisor, Jackie Norris.
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...the evidence suggests that his White House fired a public official who refused to roll over to protect a Presidential crony.


Editors at the State Media offices of the Washington Post published an unauthorized and hateful editorial on healthcare reform, The President's Health Care Promises. Whoops!

The government is good at "saving" money by simply reimbursing Medicare and Medicaid providers for less than their cost. It is essentially a tax that the government imposes - a tax that doctors and hospitals pay for staying in business. But this tax raises doctors' and hospitals' costs, forcing them to charge private patients more to compensate for the lost Medicare and Medicaid revenue.

In the short run, these higher costs will force more people out of private insurance and into Mr. Obama's proposed government-provided insurance. In the longer run, as fewer people carry private insurance, it disappears and there is no one to pay this tax. With the profit motive removed, there will be fewer hospitals and fewer doctors practicing medicine. That means less health care to go around.


One of our favorite Townhall columnists, Laura Hollis, writes Governance By Destruction. Read it all - click here. Her clarity is both rare and refreshing. One question: Is it hateful to discuss the things liberals progressives communists hate?

Liberals profess to “love” all kinds of things: whales, polar bears, snail darters, the planet. Strangely, few of them are human. Or anything that makes humans’ lives better. What seems to drive most liberals is hatred and a need for control. What they control, they destroy. And there are few things they hate as much as American business.
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We should not be surprised that liberalism’s approaches to business are failures. Consider its 40-year reign over our social policies, and witness the legacy:

Liberals wanted to redefine marriage and remake the family. The result? A divorce rate that now hovers between 45 – 50%, a precipitous decline in the number of two-parent households (a primary indicator of poverty), a birthrate that barely replaces the population (with corresponding devastating consequences for Social Security) and an illegitimacy rate of close to 40% (among African-Americans it is over 70%). Need we mention welfare’s role in all of this?
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Liberals have hated the internal combustion engine...
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They hate farming.
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They hate pharmaceutical companies.
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They hate power companies.
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They hate the military.
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...they hate guns and ammunition...
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They hate the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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For decades, liberalism has crept surreptitiously through our courts, our educational system and our media. Now, with the election of Barack Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress, liberalism is in full glory and ascendant. All the things they have loathed in private, they can now assail in public. And American businesses are at the top of the list.


Adding to the topic two posts down - Operation Vigilent Eagle - James Taranto responds to Bonnie Erbe's call for "ridding the Internet and the public dialouge of hate speech".

This is not Islamist Iran or communist Cuba or some tin-pot military dictatorship. Our government does not simply round people up. It cannot deprive people of their liberty without a legal basis to do so, and it has no authority to punish people merely for expressing political views, no matter how odious.


Link to Taranto's video on this subject.

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